Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences created a microscopic fidget spinner to illustrate the facility’s unique resources and expertise available to scientists across the world. The microscale fidget spinner measures only 100 microns wide, or one tenth of a millimeter.

Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory created a microscale fidget spinner that measures only 100 microns wide, or one tenth of a millimeter, as an outreach tool for students.

One drop of liquid, a cutting-edge laser 3D-printer and a few hours are all it takes to make a fidget spinner smaller than the width of a human hair.

The tiny whirligig was created by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences to illustrate the facility’s unique resources and expertise available to scientists across the world. The microscale fidget spinner measures only 100 microns wide, or one tenth of a millimeter, but the capabilities it represents are enormous.

“We felt like it would be an interesting demonstration for younger people who may not know that the federal government maintains these user facilities around the country, which anybody can use as long as they submit a successful proposal,” said ORNL’s Adam Rondinone.

The Nanoscribe machine that built the fidget spinner is also used by researchers to create microfluidic and micromechanical devices for scientific applications. The instrument uses a focused laser to convert a liquid into a solid at a microscopic level. This process, much like 3D printing, allows researchers to precisely design and build complex designs to make functional microscale devices with moving components. Watch a video of scientists creating and testing the fidget spinner here.

More than 650 researchers used CNMS resources last year to conduct wide-ranging experiments in nanomaterials synthesis; nanofabrication; imaging, microscopy and characterization; and theory, modeling and simulation. CNMS is a Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility.

“Our job is to offer cutting-edge experiments, instrumentation and expertise, to help other scientists to achieve their goals,” Rondinone said.

All the tools at CNMS are available through the facility’s user program, which is open to users from academia, the private sector, and research institutes worldwide. Access is free of charge to users who publish the results in the open literature. Because of this, Rondinone explains, researchers at companies may be less aware of the resources available to them, or hesitant to use them.

“We work with industrial partners to help them identify fundamental science questions that we can answer and then publish in open literature, without jeopardizing their intellectual property,” he said.

The team plans to build an interactive microscopic fidget spinner exhibit as part of ORNL’s Traveling Science Fair.

“It's a compelling way for us to reach out to the next generation of scientists,” Rondinone said.

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science. The single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, the Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit www.science.energy.gov/.

Filters

An international team of scientists --- including several researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory -- - has discovered an anode battery material with superfast charging and stable operation over many thousands of cycles.

Vector polarizers are a light filtering technology hidden behind the operation of many optical systems. They can be found, for instance, in sunglasses, LCD screens, microscopes, microprocessors, laser machining and more. Optical physicists published details of their new vector polarizer design this week in APL Photonics. The newly proposed design is a major advance in polarization technology because it enables flexible filtering of a wide range of light sources and generation of new light states.

Scientists have come up with a way to massively speed up the ordering process for self-assembling materials. The resulting ultra-small, well-ordered patterns could be used in the fabrication of microelectronics, antireflective surfaces, magnetic data storage systems, and fluid-flow devices.

Researchers from Stanford University, two Department of Energy national labs and the battery manufacturer Samsung created a comprehensive picture of how the same chemical processes that give cathodes their high capacity are also linked to changes in atomic structure that sap performance.

A new Petascale Data Transfer Node project aims to to achieve regular disk-to-disk, end-to-end transfer rates of one petabyte per week between major supercomputing facilities, which translates to achievable throughput rates of about 15 Gbps on real world science data sets.

Filters

NAU Regents' Professor Bruce Hungate, director of the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss), recently joined a new initiative lead by LLNL to study how the soil microbiome controls the mechanisms that regulate the stabilization of the organic matter in soil.

Scientists pause each afternoon at Kirtland Air Force Base in Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, awaiting the daily lightning flash and unmistakable floor jolt that accompanies a Z shot

The University of Illinois at Chicago has received a five-year, $4.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to help industrial, commercial, institutional and utility entities evaluate and install highly efficient combined heat and power (CHP) technologies.CHP, also known as cogeneration, is a single system that produces both thermal energy and electricity.

ECS, in a continued partnership with the Toyota Research Institute of North America (TRINA), a division of Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America, Inc. (TEMA), is requesting proposals from young professors and scholars pursuing innovative electrochemical research in green energy technology.

John Carlisle has been named the director of Chain Reaction Innovations (CRI), a program aimed at accelerating job creation through innovation, based at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory.

This fall, U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced nearly $4.7 million in funding for the department's Argonne National Laboratory across 16 projects in three divisions. Four of those TCF awards, representing more than $1 million in funds, are slated for Argonne's Nuclear Engineering division.

Southern Research has been selected to receive nearly $1.7 million in U.S. Department of Energy funding to develop a new, cost-efficient gasifier capable of converting low-grade coal into synthesis gas (syngas) that can be used in a number of applications.

The world's most advanced particle accelerator for investigating the quark structure of matter is gearing up to begin its first experiments following official completion of an upgrade to triple its original design energy. The Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at the Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility is now back online and ramping up for the start of experiments.